To prepare, here are seven things you need to know about store visit conversions. Advertising Continue reading below 1. What are store visit conversions? Google estimates store visit conversions by looking at phone location history to determine if someone who clicked on your search ad ended up visiting your store. Google looks at ad clicks across all devices – smartphone, desktop, and tablet. In-store conversion data will help you understand which ad campaigns, keywords, and devices are sending the most people to your store so you can optimize your account for increased ROI. This does not guarantee that someone bought from you, just that they visited after clicking on one of your ads. Google's goal is to provide the data so that you can attribute the online value of your advertising spend.
In less than 2 years, advertisers in the retail, foodservice, travel, automotive and financial industries have had over 1 billion image masking service in-store visits worldwide. For privacy reasons, store conversion data is based on anonymous, aggregated data collected from individuals who have Location History enabled. A conversion cannot be linked to an ad click or a person. Advertising Continue reading below Additionally, as Matt Lawson, Director of Performance Ads Marketing for Google, wrote on Search Engine Land: Just being near a store does not automatically count as a visit. There are additional considerations. We know that a one minute visit is not the same as a thirty minute visit. One minute could just mean a shopper passed by a store on the way to get a hot pretzel from Aunt Anne at the food court.
There is even too much time spent in one place. Employees who spend time in stores in long, visible patterns are not counted as in-store visitors. Here is Google's official video presentation on store visit conversions: 2. What technology does Google use to measure store visits? Google Maps knows the exact coordinates and borders of millions of businesses around the world. That's why the team worked with the Google Maps team to match the location history of hundreds of millions of users with Maps data from over 2 million businesses. Google claims to use a hybrid approach with a large number of signals to measure visits. According to Marketing Land, some of these signals include: Google Earth data and Google Maps Street View.